Self contained, self-constructing breathing apparatus

There are lots of wrecks to dive into ….but in diving all wrecks begin to be approached

Snowy Images for Slushy Times

“All that is solid melts into air, all that is holy is profaned, and man is at last compelled to face with sober senses, his real conditions of life, and his relations with his kind.”— Karl Marx

The Snow Man

by Wallace Stevens

One must have a mind of winter
To regard the frost and the boughs
Of the pine-trees crusted with snow;

And have been cold a long time
To behold the junipers shagged with ice,
The spruces rough in the distant glitter

Of the January sun; and not to think
Of any misery in the sound of the wind,
In the sound of a few leaves,

Which is the sound of the land
Full of the same wind
That is blowing in the same bare place

For the listener, who listens in the snow,
And, nothing himself, beholds
Nothing that is not there and the nothing that is.

Images are how we have begun to experience ourselves– individually and, increasingly, collectively. And yet, they are changable and ephemeral: will my own ontological experience begin to resemble an etch-a-sketch, junior palimpsest extraordinaire? What about their vexed position in the metonymic chain: they promise(d) actual representation of reality, but in fact this referent is not acessible through language or even experience: what we “experience” as a contrivance is not literally the “same” as an experience.

And yet, electracy, as prefigured by literature, permits us to rework the idea of “experience”.In both I am having a kind of “prosthetic” “experience”. The key difference in electracy is that I no longer know the status of this “I” or “me” or I/me or what “experience” means anymore.

The rubric through which “authentic” and “inauthetic” experiences are reckoned is morphing– “real” and “fake” is transvalued a bit– it’s not what happened in a “real world”, but how it made you “feel”– what your subjective experience is.

Even metaphysics sneeze…

I have a terrible cold,

And everyone knows how terrible colds

Alter the whole system of the universe,

Set us against life,

And make even metaphysics sneeze.

– from a poem by Fernando Pessoa

Fernando,

Commit to allegorical snark– 

what would you say to the effects of a yellow fever on your metaphysics–an  infection spreads, leaking out of its host, dissolving what it depends on, mindless exacting replication–adaptation without will–What kind of body can i craft to stay well? To stay productively ill,  should i save my skin?